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RIO DE JANEIRO—For 16 years he’s waited, answering his country’s call whenever it came, battling time and age and opponents much younger than himself to get one more shot at the big prize.

And in being denied that chance one last time, Daniel Nestor went out firing bullet-like volleys at the chair umpire and the circumstances that will keep him and partner Vasek Pospisil from the dream of Rio Olympics gold.

Nestor and Pospisil were beaten by Spain’s Rafael Nadal and Marc Lopez, 7-6 (1), 7-6 (4) in the Olympic doubles semifinal in the gathering dusk of the Olympic Tennis Centre, left to regroup to play Americans Jack Sock and Steve Johnson for the bronze medal Friday (4:20 p.m. ET, CBC).

A medal of any description will be a measure of Nestor’s abilities, longevity and his willingness to represent his country. He was added to the team at basically the last moment when Milos Raonic decided there were issues far too questionable to allow him to compete and now has a chance to bookend his Olympic career with medals.

“I came here because I thought we had a chance to win a medal, otherwise I wouldn’t have come and now we have that chance,” he said. “We had two chances and hopefully we get the second one.”

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For Nestor, the 43-year-old late addition to the team and the 2000 Sydney Games doubles gold medallist, the loss was difficult to swallow.

Normally reserved, Nestor lashed out at chair umpire Joseph Emmanuel of France during and after the match, a blistering critique from a player not prone to overt displays of emotion either way.

“I’ve played for a long time and I haven’t seen calls missed that badly,” Nestor said. “The first one in the first set was a very important point. If we go up 4-1 and consolidate that break, then we’ve got a lot of momentum considering we’re creating opportunities on their serve a lot.”

The second call, an out ruling on a Nestor volley that was most assuredly in, didn’t change any momentum — the Canadians went on to win the game to force the tiebreaker — but it was more egregious for its incorrectness.

“The second set, it wasn’t necessarily the reason why we lost but I just don’t understand how you can miss a call like that so it makes me wonder what’s going on,” Nestor said.

Nadal, whose day included a third-round singles match that finished about an hour before the doubles semifinal and a mixed doubles match shortly after beating the Canadians, was at his fist-pumping best most of the match.

In his first competition since before he pulled out of the French Open in May, he made a series of big shots in the second second-set tiebreaker to seal the win.

“I didn’t play my best,” Pospisil said. “They just played the bigger points better, I think that was what made the difference, and that’s what’s disappointing about it.”

The match was certainly in a cozy atmosphere that didn’t fit with the significance of the event.

A side court — Court 3 — at the main tennis centre on the Barra Olympic park grounds was an intimate setting, to say the least.

The 1,792 seats were filled long before the teams took to the court, the crush of media made it impossible to get anywhere near the court and for a big-time event it had a decidedly low-rent facility.

Part of that was made necessary because of rains that forced postponement of play this week and part because the facility built especially for the games doesn’t have the stadium and grandstand seating players are used to at important tour events.

“I think the conditions, to be honest, were very tough,” Pospisil said. “It was very tough to volley in wind like this, and I think that definitely didn’t help our cause, especially because it was a little bit of an equalizer in terms of the strategy that we had against guys who don’t serve very big. So it was tougher today to execute.”

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